The Warriors eBook

This is a Titanic intellectual task, as well as a
spiritual one. When a doctor wishes to keep plague
out of America, he goes to Asia, to see what plague
is! He takes microscopes, instruments, and drugs;
he buries himself in a laboratory, and gives his whole
mind to the problem, until one day he can come forth
and tell how to heal and help. More than this,
he risks his life. For every great discovery in
medical practice, doctors and nurses have died martyrs
to their faithful work.

Moral evil must be studied in an energetic and intellectual
way. The variations of humanity from righteousness
must be deeply understood. Look at Booker T.
Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring,
what indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and
swerveless hope have been put into their task!
Edison is said to have spent six months hissing S
into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter,
and many days he worked seventeen hours a day.
Have many ministers ever bent themselves in this way
to solve a special moral problem—­that of,
say, a disobedient child in the congregation?
Have they spent six months, hours and hours a day,
to make the law of God, the word Obedience, ring in
that child’s ears? Spiritual guidance is
definitely and positively a scientific task.
The mastery of one fact may lead to the correlation
of a psychic law. When a minister can help a
soul to overcome temptation, and a parent to bring
up a child, he is in touch with two final human problems.
As he gradually enlarges his careful and illuminating
work, his church becomes in time a body of spiritually
well-educated communicants, thoroughly grounded in
doctrinal, ethical, and social ideals, well taught
in public and in private duties. It is not self-centred
or wholly denominational in spirit, but recognizes
itself to be a part of a catholic body of believers,
reaches out with friendly cooeperation to near-by
churches, extends its missionary efforts to other
neighborhoods or lands, and partakes of a world-life,
a world-love!

Ruling religious thinkers should also, by and by,
become leaders of national thought and life.
Great public questions should be open to their judgment
and appeal; they should be moral arbiters, and spiritual
guides in national crises. By a word they should
be able to rouse the prayers of the country, and by
a word to still widespread anger and uprising.
If accredited spiritual leaders cannot help, who can?

There are a few men living who seem to hold, for the
whole world, the temporal balance. They control
mines and shipping, banks and trade. Who, to-day,
holds the spiritual destiny of the world in his hand?
I long to see men appear upon whom the eyes of the
world shall be fastened, in recognition of their spiritual
preeminence, as they are now fastened on these industrial
giants.

Rise! Let some man, earnest and endowed, look
forward into the future, and with the courage that
comes from inborn power, assert himself among the
nations! Allay, O World-Evangelist, not only neighborhood
disputes, but international dissensions; project a
creed that shall be profound and universal; sweep
sects together, unite energy and endeavor, baptize
with fire, bring repentance, quicken the race-conscience,
uplift the World-Hope! Erect and elemental, hold
CHRIST before the race!